rm Rio Nolb\ cess Netan 1 — An Intefactive Approach aos __» to Language Pedagogy @ SECOND EDITION H. DOUGLAS BROWNTEACHING WRITING How is writing like swimming? Give up? Answer: ‘The psycholinguist Eric Lenneberg (1967) once noted, in a discussion of “species specific” human behavior, that human beings universally learn to walk and to talk, but that swimming and writing arc cul turally specific, learned behaviors. We learn to swim if there is a body of water avail- able and usually only if someone teaches us. We fearn to write if we are members of a literate society, and usually only if someone teaches us. Just as there are non-swimmers, poor swimmers, and excellent swimmers, so it is for writers. Why isn’t everyone an excellent writer? What is it about writing that blocks so many people, even in their own native language? Why don't people learn to write “naturally,” as they learn to talk? How can we best teach second language learners of English how to write? What should we be trying to teach? Let’s look at these and many other related questions as we tackle the last of the “four skills” RESEARCH ON SECOND LANGUAGE WRITING 334 ‘Trends in the teaching of writing in ESL and other foreign languages have, not sur- prisingly, coincided with those of the teaching of other skills, especially listening and speaking. You will recall from earlier chapters that as communicative language teaching gathered momentum in the 1980s, teachers learned more and more about how to teach fluency, not just accuracy, how to use authentic texts and contexts in the classroom, how to focus on the purposes of linguistic communication, and how to capitalize on learncrs' intrinsic motives to learn, Those same trends and the prin- ciples that undergirded them also applied to advances in the teaching of writing in second language contexts. Over the past few decades of research on teaching writing to sccond language Jearners,a number of issues have appeared, some of which remain controversial in spite of reams of data on second language writing. Here is a brief look at some of those issues. HMHKHKKAKHKKLCKKAKKAKHKAKKKEOKALKLKHARKARR AAD BB!cHarree 19. Teaching Writing 335 1, Composing vs. writing A simplistic view of writing would assume that written language is simply the graphic representation of spoken language, and that written performance is much like oral performance, the only difference lying in graphic instead of auditory sig- nals. Fortunately, no one holds this view today. The process of writing requires an entirely different set of competencies and is fundamentally different from speaking in ways that have already been reviewed in the last chapter. The permanence and distance of writing, coupled with its unique rhetorical conventions, indeed make writing as different from speaking as swimming is from walking. ‘One major theme in pedagogical research on writing is the nature of the com- posing process of writing. Written products are often the result of thinking, drafting, and revising procedures that require specialized skills, skills that not every speaker develops naturally. The upshot of the compositional nature of writing has produced writing pedagogy that focuses students on how to generate ideas, how to organize them coherently, how to use discourse markers and rhetorical conventions to put them cohesively into a written text, how to revise text for clearer meaning, how to edit text for appropriate grammar, and how to produce a final product. 2. Process vs. product Recognition of the compositional nature of writing has changed the face of writing classes. A half a century ago, writing teachers were mostly concerned with the final product of writing: the essay, the report, the story, and what that product should “look” like. Compositions were supposed to (a) meet certain standards of prescribed English rhetorical style, (b) reflect accurate grammar, and (c) be orga- nized in conformity with what the audience would consider to be conventional. A good deal of attention was placed on “model” compositions that students would emulate and on how well a student's final product measured up against a list of cri- teria that included content, organization, vocabulary use, grammatical use, and mechanical considerations such as spelling and punctuation. There is nothing inherently wrong with attention to any of the above criteria. They are still the concern of writing teachers. But in due course of time, we became better attuned to the advantage given to learners when they were scen as creators of language, when they were allowed to focus on content and message, and when their own individual intrinsic motives were put at the center of learning. We began to develop what is now termed the process approach to writing instruction. Process approaches do most of the following (adapted from Shih 1986): a, focus on the process of writing that leads to the final written product; b. help student writers to understand their own composing process; c. help them to build repertoires of strategies for prewriting, drafting, and rewriting; 4. give students time to write and rewrite; ¢. place central importance on the process of revision;